Interview with James Lynch

Interview with James Lynch

James J. Lynch, Ph.D., a psychologist, researcher, and author, is a pioneer in the field of the health implications of human loneliness and social isolation.

James J.
Lynch, Ph.D., a psychologist, researcher, and author, is a pioneer in the field
of the health implications of human loneliness and social isolation. His three
books on the topic include The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of
Loneliness (1976), The Language of the Heart: The Human Body in Dialogue (1985)
and A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness
(2000). He has also authored fifteen chapters in medical textbooks and over 100
articles in peer reviewed medical journals, and maintains a Web presence at www.lifecarehealth.com[5].

Can you briefly describe your area of expertise and
background?

Lynch: I started working in this field in 1965 as a post-doc
student at Johns Hopkins Medical School under W. Horsley Gantt, M.D., who was
the last American student of Ivan Pavlov. We were essentially trying to create
hypertension in animals to develop drugs to control high blood pressure (in
humans). By accident, we started to notice the powerful effect humans had on
these animals' cardiovascular system. We began to observe if you pet a dog, its
blood pressure will drop fifty percent. And we began to see this effect
throughout the animal kingdom, and we published a number of studies on it. But
no one paid any attention to this, because it was the 1960s, when Dr. Christian
Barnard performed the first heart transplant in South Africa. Which was, in
essence, the culmination of the mechanistic model. It was the absolute pump as a
heart!

From there, I eventually became a professor at the Maryland
Medical School, where we asked this question: If human beings can affect the
hearts of animals, can we affect other human being's hearts in similar ways? We
began to monitor patients and watch them around the clock. What happened if a
wife sat by the patient's bedside? What happened when a nurse took a patient's
pulse? We began to see that even the most transient human contact had marked
effects on heart rate and blood pressure. And we began to study patients in the
trauma units who were in comas and couldn't move a muscle. We began to see that
when you held a patient's hand, even in this acute state, there was an immediate
heart rate reaction to the human touch.

That led to the next question: If
transient contact between human beings has such an effect on the cardiovascular
system, what does the long-term absence of human contact do to our hearts? Does
human loneliness have an effect on our hearts?

How did you go about exploring this previously-ignored relationship
between human feelings and health outcomes?

Lynch: 1970 was the first
census year that marital status was taken into account on health surveys; prior
to that it wasn't even considered an important variable. And when I looked at
this data, I was shocked to see that single people in the United States, whether
never married or widowed or divorced, had a 2-10 times higher death rate than
married people. This was true of all ages, races, and both sexes, across the
country.

The effects were very pronounced with heart disease[2]. That's when
I wrote and published my first book, The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences
of Loneliness, documenting this.

That book had quite a powerful effect on
the national psyche back in the seventies. People kind of intuitively knew that
loneliness had something to do with their health, but how do you go from
loneliness to hypertension or stroke or cancer[3]? What are the mechanisms?

It was then that we got the first automated blood pressure machine,
which allowed us to talk to patients while studying their cardiovascular
systems. We started to notice that talking had profound effects on blood
pressure across the board. And at first it looked like a paradox that loneliness
kills, but when you talk your blood pressure goes way up! And we began to see
later on that it was the very people who had the largest pressure rises when
they spoke that tended to withdraw from contact with people because of this
unfelt stress[6].

Except for people with schizophrenia, everybody's blood
pressure goes up when they speak. We began to look at babies crying, who double
their blood pressure when they cry. We looked at children in schools, whose
blood pressure goes up when they read. There's a linear equation across time
that the older you are, the more your blood pressure goes up when you speak.
Even people with hypertension experience this rise in blood pressure when they
speak, and no medications block these effects.

So I spent the decade of
the eighties observing the epidemiological extent of the phenomenon. We began to
see that communication has a lot to do with the regulation of the cardiovascular
system. We saw huge surges of blood pressure in heart patients when they would
try to talk about emotionally[7] provocative topics. And we began to understand
over time that emotional catharsis - sort of "vomiting up" your feelings-can
actually cause damage.

So how can we help these patients?

Lynch: We looked for
treatment options for these patients. And we discovered there were two
physiologies: a hydraulic machine physiology, and a communicative physiology,
and we had to pay special attention to the specific communicative needs of
patients if we were going to restore health. People can talk their way into
heart disease[2], and we can help them talk their way out of it. We think that
talking is mental, but when we speak to others, we're touching their hearts. So
we need to pay attention to this.

If you look at the American Heart
Association[8], they mandate in phase II cardiac rehabilitation that you pay
attention to three things: exercise[9], diet[10] and stress[6]. But they never say what
stress is. And the main stress is communicative stress… When you speak, your
blood pressure rises, and when you listen, it falls.

What's the best thing people can do to improve or maintain their
health?

Lynch: It's the separation from self, from the living world, that
brings disease. We are our brother's keeper, so the best thing you can do is try
to love. And the word is the only place that love resides.

What are some of the interesting things happening in this area of
social isolation and loneliness research today?

Lynch: The most
interesting thing is the development of a whole clinical model that is based on
this information, and is used to help and treat coronary heart disease patients,
and to look at how what we call the "hidden dialogue" can be used.

An
example of this "hidden dialogue" is blushing. If I am chatting with you and I
blush, you see it, and you may sense my discomfort and change the subject to one
that is more comfortable, because you don't want to see me suffer, and you don't
want to feel uncomfortable! My vascular change (in my face) is a message to you.
But if I blush inside due to elevated blood pressure and you don't see it and I
don't feel it, conversations quickly become murderous! I feel misunderstood and
you feel misunderstood.

The body is a dialogic instrument; it's not a
machine. The essential thesis we now have is that there is a communal body. The
body isn't separate from the mind. We have a whole model now of using this
research to help patients grasp why insight alone is never sufficient to help
with diseases. We've shifted the whole notion of what it means to interact. The
whole notion of catharsis puts people at great risk.

I am so excited
about the spiritual implications (of communication). We're reversing the
historical Darwinian/Cartesian/ Freudian ethic, which involves removing speech
from the body. The whole notion of the word made flesh is what we're trying to
drive toward, the incarnation. It's irrespective of what your religious
perspective is. If you use the Christian model, the only word for God in the New
Testament is "the word made flesh." Speaking with another person is really a
dance with divinity.

Another spiritual implication is that in the 20th
century, for the first time in history, we electronically removed the voice from
the body (through technology). We're speaking from no place to nobody, and there
are no feelings left.

Can you talk more about this modern technological "disembodiment" of
the human voice, and the implications it has on our health?

Lynch: Here's a
story. When my mother died, she was 94. She was a Gaelic-speaking woman from
Ireland, in a very rural area. In her lifetime, her village lost its language.
Her village existed for 5,000 years, and it was essentially Gaelic-speaking.
When she was a child, every voice you heard had to be face to face. All music
had to be sung. People in her town lived together and died together. It was by
no means paradise, but there was strength in the tribe, and it eliminated
loneliness. Her village had withstood famine, the Vikings, English persecution,
and still retained its language. But when the (telephone) wires came to that
village, it died. The wires lifted the voice from the flesh, so words lost their
home.

That happens all the time now with technology. People speak from
outside their bodies, so the words lack meaning. It becomes murderous! You have
to bring people into their flesh to have any hope of a real relationship, and
that's a spiritual journey.

How did you get interested in integrative medicine?

Lynch: I
think I was dragged into it kicking and screaming, because I was a major
mechanist! Even when I wrote The Broken Heart, showing that loneliness was a
major contributor to heart disease[2], I still was looking at loneliness as "one
more thing:" one pound of cholesterol, two pounds of salt, another pound of
loneliness, and you get disease.

It took me a long time to move off of
that Cartesian model, because I had no idea how deeply I had breathed it in and
how it affected my thinking. The model is just there and it took a long time to
totally change my view. Only now, later in life, am I really beginning to
understand what the body is.

What's a common health-related mistake you
see your patients or clients making, and how can they avoid it?

Lynch: The most
common mistakes people make is to take their relationships[11] for granted, and to
accept the mechanistic model of disease. Every (heart) patient I see has just
had stents put in, has just had surgery, and the whole model is hydraulic. When
they first see me, they're angry at the cardiologist. Why do they have to see a
shrink? Then when I show them how their blood pressure changes more when they
talk than it did when they were on a treadmill, and how their blood pressure
changes when they listen, they see the logic in it.

So the most common
mistakes are to trivialize communication and to trivialize relationships. And
especially to trivialize our relationship to the rest of the living
world-animals, trees, and so on. I go nuts when I hear people say they've got to
save nature, as if all humans aren't part of nature! We have to save ourselves.
So there are very profound spiritual implications (of not communicating). I
won't dance around the issue of spirituality. I think that's really the most
important thing.

What is your next professional endeavor?

Lynch: I still see
patients, and I am also writing a book called Speaking of Love. What does it
mean to say "I love you?" Who is the I? What is love; what does that verb mean?
Who are you? So I am trying to write a book on that.